Guises and Dollses
by William Easley
Summary: Halloween, 2015: At sixteen, the Pines Twins are too old for trick-or-treat, but a neighbor just down the street is ten, the right age if only Mabel can figure out the perfect costume for him... As always, Gravity Falls is the property of the Walt Disney Company and Alex Hirsch. I earn no money from writing my stories and do it to amuse myself and, I hope, my readers.


**Guises and Dollses**

* * *

 **(October 24-31, 2015)**

Halloween fell on a Saturday that year, and that was ideal for a spooky masked ball in the high-school gym. Mabel threw herself into the costuming effort. Picked herself up by the scruff of the neck, took a practice swing or two, and flung herself smack in the middle of planning for a Halloween disguise for her, a matching one for her Brobro, and hang the expense! Hang it on Dad's credit card!

For days, she ran through the whole litany of possibilities: Salt and Pepper. Salt and Battery. Joy and Fear. Dipper's reaction to that led her to change the suggestion to Joy and Anger. No. Guy Faulks and Guy Wire. Hi and Lo. Black and Blue—

"Are you nuts?" Dipper asked one Saturday morning, exactly a week before Halloween. He was lying on his bed, his new Journal open on his knees, confiding to it his frustration with track—no matter how well he did, his new coach kept finding things to criticize, his philosophy being roughly "Run 'em until they drop." And how much he missed Wendy, their constant texting and three-times-a-week face-time chats notwithstanding.

Mabel sprawled on the floor of his bedroom, surrounded by magazines, pattern books, and fish-shaped crackers. She'd read someplace that fish was brain food, that it helped you think. So far, though, nothing.

As Dipper scribbled, Mabel kept muttering under her breath: "OK, OK, Walnut and Pecan. No? Darn. Poop heck darn. This used to be so easy."

Dipper didn't respond, beyond an absent-minded "Mm-hm."

Mabel leaned forward and gently knocked her forehead on the floor. "Come on, Dip," she pleaded. "We got one week!"

"You're the creative one," Dipper said, barely glancing over. "Don't knock yourself out. I mean that literally."

Mabel sat up and leaned back, bumping her head against the corner walls. "Ouch! You're saying you're not creative? No, you are! You play guitar, you wrote a published book—is it still on the best-seller list?"

"Number three for children's fiction," Dipper said complacently, closing his Journal. "I think it's topped out."

"Number three for a whole month!" Mabel wailed. "Come on, _Bride of the Zombie!_ Pick up the pace! You can make those last two lousy slots!"

"It's doing fine where it is," Dipper said. "Don't jinx it."

"Did you do the editing on the lake one?"

"All done. Got half the third one in rough draft."

"You can do all that and you can't help a sweet, kind, sister?"

Dipper shrugged. "Dunno. Wish I had one."

"Oooh, _burn_! OK, seriously. Come onnnn," Mabel moaned. "Little help here! You wanna go to the dance, don't you?" Her voice took on a musical, sing-songy quality: "Lots of girls are going who don't have da-ates! I know a whole bunch of unattached sophomores would, like, kill for a chance to dance with a junior track star!"

Dipper mimicked one of Mabel's tongue sounds. "Pfblt! Like _that's_ a big temptation."

Mabel sprang up and came to sit on the foot of his bed. He had to move his feet a little to the right to accommodate her. "Broseph! Wendy _told_ you she wants you to dance and go to parties like a normal teen! Come on—you trust _her_ to go to dances. Give her a chance to trust _you_!"

"It's different now," Dipper said, leaning against the wall and folding his arms. "We kind of have an understanding."

"So do Teek and me!" Mabel said, waving her arms. "Big deal. We _trust_ each other, Bro! It's fine for us to even date other people when we're apart! He can go to movies with a girl as long as they don't kiss or hold hands. I can go on dates with guys. He'll never find out about them, anyway!"

Dipper sighed. "Wendy would trust me, Mabel. That's not it. I . . . just don't have a great time at dances when I go stag. And I won't date another girl, because there's no other girl I'd want to date. But, OK, you're gonna pester me until I say I'll go, so I'll be there, but not with a date. And no fixing me up with girls on the fly! That never works."

"OK, OK, you got it," Mabel said, as though she were making a major concession. "Now, costumes: You're a bee, I'm a daisy?"

"Definitely not!" Dipper said. "We're twins, you're talking birds and bees—we'd never live that down!"

Mabel bounced on the bed. "Brainstorm! Got it, got it, got it!"

"Stop channeling Mayor Cutebiker," Dipper said. "What have you got?"

We go as each other!"

"Nope," Dipper said. "Then _guys_ would be hitting on me."

"Variety," Mabel said impishly, "is the spice—"

Firmly, Dipper growled, "I said no."

Grumbling a little, Mabel hopped off the bed, dropped to the floor, and for a few minutes doodled on her sketch pad. "It's sooo much harder to design for cutesy as we get older," she complained. Then, with a deep sigh, she added, "At least we don't go trick-or-treating any longer."

"You loved trick-or-treating!" Dipper said, surprised.

She shrugged. "Yeah, but you grow out of it. I mean, I'm sixteen, I'm old enough to drive, I'd look pretty lame going around begging for candy. Anyway, lots of people won't give it to middle teens, the cheapskates." She looked up suddenly, panic in her eyes. Do you think it's gonna rain on Halloween? Sometimes it rains."

"This time of year, there's about a fifteen per cent chance of that," Dipper said. "But we won't be outside, anyway."

"Oh, hey, that reminds me, Billy, Mina, and Mira all want me to help them think of costumes. Mina and Mira are gonna walk Billy around, so he can trick-or-treat. I'm gonna go there right after dinner. Wanna come with me? I'll drive."

Though Billy Sheaffer seemed to look up to him—though he knew nothing of Dipper's being on the high-school track team or being a writer—that made Dipper feel uncomfortable. "Not really, because—wait, what? Drive? It's only five houses down!"

"Might rain," Mabel said. "Fifteen per cent chance!"

"You know," he said, "there are times when I'd like to drive our car, too."

"I'll ask Helen about that," Mabel said.

Helen Wheels was the name she had given to their car, a joint sixteenth-birthday present to the twins from their parents. In the seven weeks since they'd received it, Dipper had driven it on three occasions, Mabel about every day.

"If she votes against me," Dipper said, "You vote for me. That would make it two to one."

"Helen," Mabel said complacently, "has veto power."

* * *

The days were getting shorter, and they walked down to their old house—Dad had ultimate veto power, and he didn't give permission for Mabel to drive—after dinner in a gathering twilight with a drifting gray cloud cover overhead.

Going inside the house still gave Dipper a strange feeling. It was, as Mabel used to say, same-y but different-y from the time they had lived there. The Sheaffers had changed all the furniture and had redecorated almost all the rooms, but some weird little things really brought back the time that Mabel and Dipper had spent there. The newel post at the top of the stairs, for example, still had a kind of frayed corner. That was what Ripper, the family cat, used as an occasional scratching post.

Billy Sheaffer's bedroom, too, was still laid out exactly the way Dipper's had been, bed and shelves in the same places. Even the curtains were similar, and almost the same color as his old ones. It sort of creeped Dipper out that the ten-year-old Billy seemed to be living in the shell of Dipper's former life.

However, they met around the Sheaffers' dining-room table. "Dad," Billy said to Dr. Harry Sheaffer, "did you remember the books?"

His father, an assistant professor at Mills College and a tall, pale man with wire-rimmed spectacles and brown hair that always seemed to need trimming, said, "Oh, right! I've got four out in the car. I'll bring them in."

"OK, you two take a look at these," Mabel said to Mina and Mira, much darker than their father, two tallish fourteen-year-old identical twins, who were smiling with anticipation. Mabel had already treated them to sequential makeovers, and they had turned Goth, Emos (a subtle but vital difference, Mabel insisted), hipsters, and nerd-chic, each for about a day. Now she had a whole sketchbook of ideas for them to browse through.

Billy didn't look anything at all like either their mom or their dad—or the twins. He was a skinny ten-year-old with a shock of blond hair and two blue eyes—one of which was artificial, because he had been born with a condition called anophthalmia. He had a perfectly good right eye, but his left eye socket had been underdeveloped, and the left eyeball was missing at birth. Now he had a prosthetic that would fool most people unless they concentrated on his appearance.

And his favorite color was yellow.

His dad brought in an armload of books at set them down on the table. "Here you are, Billy," he said. "These four have lots of pictures, so have fun." He left the kids alone.

Dipper picked up one of the books and read the title: _Unwrapping the Secrets: Egyptian Funerary Practices._ "You want to be a mummy?" he guessed.

"Thinking about it," Billy said.

"Cool!" Mabel chimed in. "Let's see . . . about a hundred yards of gauze bandage, some gray dye, some of that teddy-bear type fur, paint it green, glue it on like moss here and there, figure out a way to make your cheekbones stand out, yeah, you'd make a great mummy!"

"That sounds like a lot of work," Billy said.

"Hah! Mabel thrives on this kind of stuff!" Mabel said. "Mabel also talks about herself in the third person! That's always amusing!"

All four of the books that Professor Sheaffer had brought home from the college library were about ancient Egypt. Billy also brought down his laptop and went online to find photos of movie-monster mummies, Boris Karloff and Tom Tyler, Christopher Lee, and Arnold Vosloo. "Man," Dipper asked, "you sure you want to do this? It looks uncomfortable."

"Don't listen to him," Mabel said. "Easy-peasy. I'll even make it so the bandages have pants and a top. You can't tell it, but you can go to the bathroom when you need to."

"It'll be hot, all wrapped up like that," Dipper said.

"Come on, Brobro. Like the French say, 'Où se trouve les toilettes des dames?' That means, 'One must suffer to be scary!'"

"Um, actually," Dipper said, "it means 'Where's the ladies' room?' I think you mean, 'Il faut souffrir pour être, uh, uh, effrayant.' My gosh, Mabel, we had two years of French—"

"Oo la-la!" Mabel said dismissively. "I can handle the mummy biz!"

"I'm not sure yet," Billy told her. "Can I make up my mind and let you know?"

"Of course, you little prince of California!" Mabel said fondly. She was developing a soft spot for Billy—even though the Pines twins were 99% certain he was a reborn Bill Cipher, however that worked. "Meanwhile, I'll work with the twins. Mina, whattaya got?"

Mina had squee'd over one of Mabel's sketches. Mira nodded. "I like it, too! I remember this!"

Dipper craned to see: a tall, skinny, smiling cartoony guy in jeans, a red-and-white striped pullover long-sleeved shirt, and a red-and-white pompon-topped toboggan cap, plus big round glasses. "Waldo?" he asked.

"Two of them," Mabel said, swiveling the sketch book. Next to the original stood an identical copy—except this one was dressed in camo. "One you can find, one you can't!"

"I love it!" Mira said. "I want the camo!"

And that solved half of the Sheaffer kids' Halloween problem.

* * *

On the afternoon of Halloween, as Mabel was getting Dipper into his costume, she said, "You sure you don't mind this?"

"I do," he told her, "but not really. I mean, this would make it real hard to dance, but then I don't want to dance, so it's OK."

Mabel was already decked out in a white wedding dress, but one that looked tattered from fleeing through briars and brush, with bits of leaves and twigs clinging to it. She had worked more leaves into her disheveled hair. Really, she looked a lot like the cartoon illustrations in the book.

Dipper—well, if Billy was going to be uncomfortable in his costume, Dipper would share his pain. Oddly, the worst thing about it was the long hoodie, which Mabel had found in a second-hand store and which was going to be warm for a Piedmont October evening. He also had to wear a black leotard, and the accoutrements were stitched to that. Five accoutrements, in fact.

"There you go," Mabel said. "Check us out!" They stood in front of the big mirror in their parents' bathroom.

Yep. There they were. Alexa and Alexis, the twins from Dipper's book _Bride of the Zombie,_ with Mabel in the bride's dress the Gnarls in the book had given her to wear, and Dipper as—five Gnarls.

Two Gnarl soft-sculpture dolls were his legs, and on their shoulders stood two more who were his torso and arms, and a fifth, headless doll—Dipper's own head rested on its neck—was the equivalent of Jeff, the head man, so to speak. They all had beards. Dipper's was a fake one, of course, brown like Jeff's and matching Dipper's hair. The others were white, except for the one who was Dipper's left leg. That beard was gray and made the Gnarl look like Shmebulock.

"You nailed it, Sis," Dipper said.

"Yep," Mabel said complacently, rearranging some leaves in her hair. "And with luck, this may goose sales of your book and finally get it up to Number 1."

Dipper laughed. "In your dreams."

The Halloween dance would start at seven PM. Mabel wanted to drive—but that pesky law still said she needed an adult in the car if Dipper rode with her, and neither their dad nor their mom felt like volunteering to chaperone. In the end, they decided to walk over to the high school. It was only twenty minutes away, and the stroll would give them time to see some of the trick-0r-treaters.

They started out at 6:30, with twilight already deepening. "Billy didn't want the mummy costume after all?" Dipper asked.

Mabel said, "Nope. He came up with something else, and his mom was going to help him with it. Don't know what. I was busy with ours and Mina's and Mira's. They turned out great!"

Little groups of kids were roaming the street already. They saw a witch and a couple of Disney princesses, a little clown, and a tiny pirate. And then, way down at the other end of the street, before they turned the corner—

"Oh, man," Dipper groaned.

The Sheaffer kids were ahead of them. Mina saw them and waved. Mina and Mira made perfect matching Waldos, one findable, one not. And between them walked an odd figure. Not a mummy.

With foam board and poster paints, Billy and his mom had made a unique costume.

Billy was dressed as . . . a pyramid. With a pyramid hat that came down to his chin, covering his head and making the point, but including an oval cut-out for his face, which from a distance looked like a single eye. His arms and legs, in black, projected out from the pyramid's sides and bottoms.

No top hat. No cane. But . . . a yellow pyramid.

"I may not want to go to the dance, after all," Dipper muttered, feeling his stomach do an odd little flip.

Mabel elbowed him.

Forcing smiles, they walked on. The Sheaffer kids spotted them and waved.

As they approached, Billy spread his arms wide. In the cut-out, his grin stretched right across his face.

"Whatta ya think?" he asked.

* * *

 _The End_


End file.
